(Daily Signal)—President-elect Donald Trump poses a serious threat to the woke bureaucrats and their left-wing allies who have injected their ideology into the administrative state, but these activists won’t be giving up easily.
As Trump staffs up for a second term, the bureaucrats have hatched at least three strategies to oppose him: returning to the left-wing nonprofit sphere to act as a government-in-waiting; passing new regulations to cement their ideology into the rules before Trump can reverse them; and burrowing into the bureaucracy to oppose him from within, the same way they did during his first term.
Trump will enter office Jan. 20 with a mandate to drain the swamp, but the swamp is working overtime to clog up the drains while it still can.
Here’s how the swamp is fighting back to defend its bureaucracy.
1. The Revolving Door
Trump has vowed to carry out a mass deportation of illegal aliens, but it is often better for aliens to “deport” themselves by leaving the country on their own terms. Similarly, some woke bureaucrats in the administrative state have begun the process of self-deportation, electing to depart the Biden-Harris administration on their own terms before Trump forces them out of government.
Tracy Stone-Manning, director of the Bureau of Land Management, is getting the heck out of Dodge. She’ll be taking over as president of The Wilderness Society in February.
The Wilderness Society, like so many other environmentalist groups, began with the noble goal of conservation, but has since become a woke activist group that opposes fossil fuels and supports “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” or DEI.
As I explain in my forthcoming book “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government,” Stone-Manning is already well familiar with the environmental activism sphere. She spent four years at the National Wildlife Federation before joining the Biden-Harris administration.
The National Wildlife Federation has worked hand in glove with the federal bureaucracy. In 2009, the Interior Department (which includes the Bureau of Land Management) found that the Bureau of Land Management was consulting with National Wildlife Federation staff on budgeting and that the staff were writing and editing official BLM materials to promote the federation’s priorities.
“We’re honored that some of our team members have served in and gone on to serve in essential state, local, and federal roles, including in Democratic and Republican administrations,” Mike Saccone, the federation’s vice president of communications, told me in remarks for the book.
Of course, The Wilderness Society also wanted a cut of the action. The Functional Government Initiative revealed in 2023 that Wilderness Society lobbyists brainstormed “legal and policy pathways” with Interior Department lawyers regarding the Twin Metals project in Minnesota. Interior later canceled leases owned by Twin Metals Minnesota, terminating a critical minerals project, as The Wilderness Society had demanded.
Stone-Manning, who notoriously wrote a threatening letter on behalf of tree-striking eco-terrorists, represents the first Biden-Harris administration official to leave in the lead-up to Jan. 20, but she won’t be the last.
2. ‘Trump-Proofing’ the Bureaucracy
Even before Trump won the 2024 presidential election, bureaucrats had been gearing up to “Trump-proof” the administrative state.
In April, the Office of Personnel Management finalized a rule that will make it harder for Trump to reinstate his “Schedule F” executive order—an order that would have made it easier for the president to fire certain bureaucrats.
Public sector unions have also schemed with bureaucrats to tie Trump’s hands ahead of time.
The Environmental Protection Agency and its employees’ unions signed a collective bargaining agreement in May that created mechanisms for employees to report any other employee whom they deem to have had “improper influence” on a scientific study.
Public sector unions may also be working to extend collective bargaining agreements to preserve certain perks, like working remotely.
I’m hearing via allies that federal government unions are scrambling to update their collective bargaining agreements to avoid getting fired. The prospect of being asked to return to the office 5 days per week like most working Americans apparently has them “in tears.”
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) November 18, 2024
Similarly, the National Institutes of Health has designated an official to identify political meddling in the agency’s work, creating a scientific integrity council to review any such cases, Politico reported.
Of course, “political meddling” is in the eye of the beholder. Conservatives rightly consider Chicken Little climate warnings (the burning of fossil fuels will bring about the end of the world) a form of political meddling in science.
Unfortunately, the bureaucrats who staff these agencies would likely consider any attempt to dial down the doomsday rhetoric a form of “political meddling,” even though the American people selected Trump, who ran on a platform of unleashing all forms of energy production, including fossil fuels.
The organization Protect the Public’s Trust has compiled a list of at least a dozen breaches of scientific integrity under the Biden administration.
Although Biden issued a Scientific Integrity Memorandum early in office, claiming that “[s]cientific findings should never be distorted or influenced by political considerations,” his Office of Science and Technology Policy “formally recognized” “indigenous knowledge” as “one of the many important bodies of knowledge that contributes to the scientific, technical, social, and economic advancements of the United States.”
Federal agencies “do not need to judge, validate, or evaluate Indigenous Knowledge using other forms of knowledge in order to include Indigenous Knowledge in Federal policy, research, or decision making,” Biden’s science office said.
3. Retrenchment
Of course, many bureaucrats will simply refuse to leave.
While some federal bureaucrats are already looking for other work, many are feverishly working to protect their jobs ahead of the Trump purge, The Washington Post reported.
Bureaucrats have started scrubbing social media and even changing their job titles in an effort to preserve their woke functions in the coming new Trump administration.
Some agencies are reclassifying jobs with “titles that could clash with Trump’s agenda, especially those promoting Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, boosting environmental justice and fighting the effects of climate change,” the Post reports.
In other words, the Environmental Protection Agency is working to reclassify the climate activist and purveyor of critical race theory (the notion that America is systemically racist against black people) who got hired to further “environmental justice,” to hide the real reason he has a job.
This will prevent the Trump administration from identifying woke activists and rooting them out, thus enabling these activists to undermine Trump’s agenda from within.
Given how vociferously the deep state fought the first Trump administration, leaking to the press and helping to launch the Trump-Russia probe and the first impeachment, Trump’s second administration must take the threats of entrenched bureaucrats quite seriously.
I humbly suggest that my book, “The Woketopus,” is a good place to start. It lays out many of the woke nonprofits that staff and advise the administrative state, bankrolled by the likes of Alex Soros and his Open Society Foundations.
This vast network should serve as a tool in identifying the worst offenders who seek to turn the federal government into a tool for the woke agenda.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
